The Forum

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Safe Passage

Having lived in Greece for 15 years, I loved Julie Skurdenis’s article on Sounion (Destinations, AO 02:05). There’s only one point of interest she missed. In ancient Greece, a light was kept burning in each of three places: on Cape Sounion, on the tip of the island of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf, and on the Acropolis. By triangulation, sailors could plot the safest route into harbor in Piraeus.

While in Greece, I kept company with a retired admiral of the Greek Navy who is a grandson of Nicholas Yannakis, Heinrich Schliemann’s assistant who helped smuggle Trojan treasures into Greece. According to my friend, Yannakis drowned while crossing a stream on his way back to Athens, and so his wife raised their family on her own. She passed on to her descendants a collection of the jewelry that didn’t quite make it to the goal it was destined for (Schliemann himself).

One day my friend said, “I’d love to give you a piece of the Troy jewelry our family inherited, but we just gave the last, a pair of gold earrings, to my niece Artemis!”

What a magnificent gift I missed having! Would I have presented it to a museum? I wonder.

So where’s the rest of the collection?—Ed.

The Moral Highground

Last year I took a working vacation as a volunteer at an archaeological dig in England, feeling good that it was a military installation at Hadrian’s Wall and not a gravesite.

I didn’t want to be a looter. But when I visited the British Museum, I marveled at the treasures, many of which were obtained in an era of looting. All who admire them, scholars or not, are a kind of looter.

I think you are right to encourage us all to do what we can and not wait for perfection (Hershel Shanks, “Let’s Do What We Can!” Editors’ Page, AO 02:05). We’d all like to preach from the moral highground, but you are wise enough to know that there isn’t any.

Sell The Duplicates!

I quite agree with selling off excess artifacts (see Editors’ Page, AO 02:05). In Italy, graves/tumuli are photographed, studied, and then sealed back up again. A friend’s family had an Etruscan necropolis on their farm and the family ate off Etruscan bucchero ware [a shiny black or gray wheel-turned pottery]. That was their table service!

Private homes in Etruria often have “wells” where the trash is deposited. The kids scamper around the countryside looking for stuff, but since it is illegal to own an antiquity, they conceal it in their “well.” You ask, and within 24 hours treasures are trotted out for purchase. Farmers (whose plows break down tumuli), shepherds and peddlers all have a trinket or two.

In Sicily, a deposit near a temple was found with over 150,000 007figurines—what could be done with them? So the well was sealed shut again. Similarly, Rome’s Villa Giulia basement is stuffed with objects not shown to the public.

Would it hurt to allow for a controlled market in antiquities—perhaps strictly regulated by antiquities authorities?

Sensing God

Herman E. Schaalman’s letter (“The Biblical God Is Just God,” The Forum, AO 02:05) states: “The only concession that scripture makes to any physical, sensory aspect in our relation to the deity is that of sound.” What about the wrestling match between God and Moses (Exodus 4:24)? Didn’t Moses touch and feel and see?

Rabbi Herman Schaalman replies:

The passage in Exodus 4:24 does not describe a “wrestling match” between God and Moses. Different translations render the Hebrew as “encountered,” “confronted” or “met.” The Hebrew vayifgeshehu is, perhaps deliberately, vague, and probably not meant to be physical.

Consider the Reader (1)

Those of us who are home-bound need some idea of the sizes of objects. For example, In “Conservation Watch” (Field Notes, AO 02:03), you describe the Nemrud Dagûi statues (above) as “huge,” “colossal,” “enormous,” “spectacular.” But exactly how big are they?

The largest of the Nemrud Dagûi statues, carved on a mountain in eastern Turkey in about 62 B.C. by the tiny Commagene kingdom, are almost 30 feet high.—Ed.

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Consider the Reader (2)

Please translate the more obscure jargon in your letters section for the benefit of readers who are not experts in the same fields of specialization as the writers. Few of your readers will be familiar with the term “metasensate” (see Rabbi Schaalman’s letter, “The Biblical God Is Just God,” The Forum, AO 02:05), although this one can be figured out with some knowledge of Greek. [It means “beyond the senses.”—Ed.] But “henotheism”? Belief in the divinity of chickens? My spell checker didn’t recognize either of these words. [But any collegiate dictionary would help you with “henotheism,” the worship of one god without denying the existence of other gods.—Ed.]

Nibbling on the Tree of Life

The article “Sons of God,” AO 02:05, by Simo Parpola, was thoroughly enjoyable. I was struck by the picture of a seal impression from fourth-millennium B.C. Uruk, showing a ruler feeding two sheep from a sacred tree. The leaves on this tree are similar to leaves on the “ram caught in a thicket” statuette excavated by Leonard Woolley in the “Royal Tombs of Ur.” The Uruk seal impression predates the ram statuette by several hundred years, yet the leaves appear to be identical. Parpola points out that throughout Mesopotamian history, kings are associated with sacred trees. Perhaps the ram (goat) is eating from the sacred Tree of Life. This may help to explain the significance of ram statuettes in a burial site.

Monumental Confusion

I very much enjoyed Larry Ball’s article on the Roman Forum (“A Great Empire’s Beating Heart,” AO 02:05).

I have a question concerning the column of Phocas. The article states that this column was 009erected in honor of the Byzantine emperor Phocas in 608 A.D. But Rome was occupied by the Visigoths in 475–500 (depending on who you talk to). In 544, the Byzantine emperor Justinian sent his most able general, Belisarius, to reconquer Italy. After protracted fighting, Belisarius reoccupied Rome and Ravenna, but he was recalled to Constantinople in 599, to defend the city against the Kotrigur Huns, and never returned to Italy.

I have always assumed that the Visigoths were able to push the remaining Byzantine forces out of Italy before the end of the sixth century. How, then, was Phocas able to erect a column in Rome as late as 608?

Larry Ball replies:

By 608 A.D., the social and political system that had been ancient Rome had long since vanished. After the fall of the Ostrogoths in 544, The Lombard kingdom in Pavia controlled most of north and central Italy. But the Byzantine empire continued to hold sway over a small band across central Italy, overseen by exarchs (governors) set up in Ravenna and Rome after Belisarius left. Since most Byzantine emperors were busy with political affairs in the east, the exarchs ruled their territory with little input from Constantinople. In many ways they resembled western medieval feudal lords, who were legitimized through their association with a more powerful king or overlord but functioned quite independently. The column in question was set up by the Roman exarch Smaragdus, in an effort to curry favor with Phocas. (Phocas himself was much too busy with civil wars and dynastic murders to set foot in Rome.) There was once a long and fawning inscription on the column, explaining Smargadus’s purposes in detail; it seems obvious that he was trying encourage at least a glance from the east, enough to bolster his own authority. A brutal and scheming ruler, Phocas ruled for only seven years (602–609 A.D.) and was assassinated a year after his column was erected; but the Byzantine exarchate remained the prevailing government in Rome for another 50 years. It finally petered out after the emperor Constans II failed to reconquer all of Italy in 663. In sum, then, the Column of Phocas—though in the ancient forum—really has more to do with the medieval period. For more reading on this topic, consult Chris Wickham’s Early Medieval Italy, and Richard Krautheimer’s Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308.

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Did you know?

The Great Pyramid at Giza, built by Pharaoh Khufu (2551–2528 B.C.), consists of 2,300,000 limestone and granite blocks, each weighing about 2.5 tons. Khufu’s workers labored for 23 years on this project—meaning that they laid a stone, on average, every five minutes.

Safe Passage